I'm glad you answered Mr. Joepyeweed I've been trying to grow you for a while now for some reason you don't want to grow here in Texas. I've tried Winter sowing, Spring Sowing, direct sowing. What's the trick to growing joepyeweed? LOL ok I have coke boxes also but I really don't think my soil would be smarter to know the difference between a Coke or Dr. Pepper box. I take it any kind of box can be used then from soda, shipping, shoe box etc. Is that right? I was worried about the dyes used in them.

I think you will want to add something that is more like leaves. Can you get a bale of straw or maybe some spoiled hay (check horse stables if there are any nearby)? I think you'll have trouble with the coffee & paper drying out and not re-wetting well. I would try to get straw and skip the peat. Just my opinion. I finished planting my lasagna raspberry patch today. The blackberries should be here (hopefully) tomorrow. Here is a link that might be useful: Tales of a Transplanted Gardener

Kendra, Yes and mostly no. If you bury a lot of vegetable matter together it will become anaerobic and smell quite bad, plant roots won't like that. "Lumpy" partially composted is fine. I regularly do sheet composting, a well-accepted method, of kitchen scraps, it increases worm population considerably. The scrap layer is only about 2-3" thick with mulch (leaves, needles, or wood chips) placed on top. Ruth Stout was an early advocate of this method. The Lasagna method even advocates layers of uncomposted vegetable matter. Some people even mix in kitchen scraps in their containers will good results. With partially composted leaves, you probably heard it ties up nitrogen, which is true, but you can overcome that by simply applying more nitrogen fertilizer. I've dug in large quantities of wood chips into my beds with great results. Many people say not to do this because it ties up nitrogen. But just two applications of fertilizer overcame this and my plants did the best in these "wood chip beds". Check out my comments in the link below for an end-of-the-season update on this wood chip bed. Here is a link that might be useful: Using wood chips in garden soil

Here's my expirence with the sod killing. Since my land had pretty nice soil to begin with, I didn't really need to fix that much, but the fescue grass and weeds were a bear to try and clear completely from my beds, I decided to try laying down the newspaper with just a light layer of compost and a 3" layer of mulch on top. The first bed I did, I only used about 5 sheets of paper and didn't let it sit much at all, just dug through the paper and planted. For the most part it did pretty well, but it was still a little more weedy then I liked. The second bed, I actually mowed down the area as low as I could (Close to scalping the dirt pretty much), then planted the flowers and shrubs and THEN laid the layers of paper (about 8 pages thick) around the plants and placed mulch on top. Absolutely no weeds last year and very few this year and pretty easiy to pull out. Now the paper has pretty much weakened to the point that the plants have been able to poke through it to basically double in size. Though if you're looking to amend your soil as well and plan on piling the amendments, I guess I'd have to ask how high you were thinking of going. The paper is going to prevent the roots from traveling down as well as it's going to keep the grass from traveling up, so unless you were planning on a good 8-12 inches deep, I might consider cutting the sod out first then making a hole in the paper where ever you plan on putting a plant. Here is a link that might be useful: My Garden